


You Are Still Talking

by theZanyArthropleura



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Action, Assassination Attempt(s), Dark Comedy, Fight Scene, Gen, Murder as Comedy, Mystery, Sort of a Crack Fic, maybe team talon, vague expy character for convenience, written entirely for the twist ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-30 01:10:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18305114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theZanyArthropleura/pseuds/theZanyArthropleura
Summary: Sombra is sent in to infiltrate a fancy gala and assassinate a wealthy target, only to find said target already eliminated - and also, somehow, still alive.





	You Are Still Talking

**Author's Note:**

> Not entirely sure what to say about this one. It started as something sort of like one of those long jokes that takes a whole story to set up the punchline, except it's not really a _joke_ , exactly.
> 
> I'm _almost_ confident I've managed to salvage it into something worthwhile.
> 
> Maybe.

A party this was, but Sombra’s kind of party it certainly was not.

Invisible, and taking extreme caution to not accidentally collide with anyone, the hacker meandered about at the edge of the room, scanning the crowd. The large, open area was lit by a series of ridiculously extravagant chandeliers high above, and at least thirty circular tables were covered in plain, white tablecloths that were probably also way more expensive than they needed to be. The pretentiously posh attendees took their merry time taking their seats, rarely managing more than ten steps through the room without being drawn into some sickeningly polite conversation.

_What’s even the point of being rich if you’re life ends up this fucking boring?_

After several more visual sweeps of the crowd – a task made annoyingly difficult by the fact that all the men had the same damn haircut and one of like three different suits – Sombra was almost definitely sure the target hadn’t arrived yet. She silently slipped out into the hallway, taking the wide staircase up to the balcony level.

Either the barely functional natural lighting was some kind of aesthetic, or whoever owned this place hadn’t paid the electric bill for anything other than the main ballroom. The hallway was distanced from the open windows by a series of alcoves marked off by stone pillars built into the walls on either side. Sombra started a quick patrol through the elevated corridors, but stopped in her tracks when she heard footsteps from just around the next bend.

A man with short, brown hair and an olive-green suit strolled into view, flanked on either side by an armed security guard.

It was the target.

The three men took up the entire width of the hallway as they proceeded down it, and in a panic, Sombra quickly ducked out of the way, into one of the stone alcoves. She leaned against the pillar, keeping her eyes on the passing procession.

She was just about to announce her success over comms when her instinctual sweep of her surroundings made her jump in surprise. The light from the small window illuminated the far side of the stone pillar, as well as the corpse slumped against its base – a man with short, brown hair, an olive-green suit, and a neat gunshot wound at the center of his forehead.

It was the target.

“ _Sombra, what is your status?_ ” Widowmaker’s smooth, nearly emotionless voice purred over comms, and Sombra realized she’d been standing there with her mouth open for probably a lot longer than she should have. “ _Has the target been dealt with?_ ”

“Uhh… _good question_ ,” was all Sombra could think to say.

“ _Sombra, we have little time for your games_.”

“Okay, okay, listen! _Escúchame_ …” Sombra began, making her best attempt to explain the situation. “Right now, I’m staring at the target with a bullet wound in his forehead, but I just saw _another_ him walking down the hall toward the balconies.”

“... _What did I_ just _say?_ ”

“Look, I’m telling it how I see it.”

“ _As always, I would prefer you did not_.”

“ _You two better finish this up… Overwatch is here_ ,” Gabe’s deep, rasping voice broke in, the last words seeming to contain far more _excitement_ than they should have.

“Seriously? How do they always know where we are?” Sombra demanded with annoyance. “We haven’t even _done_ anything yet! How fast are those fucking planes anyway?”

“ _I’ll take care of it_ ,” Gabe began, “ _Just take out the damn target, Sombra!_ ” Before the hacker could react, the sound of firing shotguns was heard over comms.

_Right, then. Go shoot the guy. Not like this identical dead body is suspicious or anything._

Sombra darted back into the main hallway, retracing her route through the corridors. As she approached the overlook to the main room, she could already hear a few concerned exclamations from the guests below.

It _probably_ had something to do with the super-powered shootout that had apparently just started outside.

She caught sight of the target several balconies off to the right of the one at the end of the hallway. She turned and passed the other openings, slowing her pace as she neared the booth where the man stood to the right of a woman with dark hair, an ornate gold dress, and fancy white gloves that ran up to near her elbows – the target’s wife, Sombra had remembered. A rich executive snob just like her husband.

The guards stood near the walls on either side of the wide balcony entrance, facing obliviously towards where Sombra stood with her machine-pistol raised. They were lucky she couldn’t shoot without letting them see her, or their charge might have been dead already. Sombra considered the situation, trying to find her best angle on the target without leaving herself exposed to his security.

“ _Mon Dieu_ , what is going _on_ down there?” the woman in the dress asked with concern as she leaned over the edge of the railing. Sombra caught a glint of silver metal as a rectangular object fell partially out of the right sleeve of the target’s suit and settled against his curled fingers, but the man paused, eyeing his wife with a strange posture. After a moment, the metal object retracted up his sleeve and he took a step toward the woman, placing a hand on her back.

Anyone else might have seen the move as a comforting gesture, but the first thought that passed through Sombra’s mind was _Holy fucking shit!_

The man’s arm tensed slightly as he began to shift his weight.

Sombra was tempted to wait and watch it happen, but she’d found her angle on the target, and in less than a second, she’d decloaked and tossed a translocator beacon that landed at the target’s feet. The guards brought up their guns at the suddenly visible intruder, but their bullets only passed through a cloud of purple pixels as Sombra reappeared to the right of the target, kicking his leg out from under him and pressing the barrel of her machine-pistol to his forehead as he fell to his knee.

The woman screamed, retreating to the corner of the balcony.

The target’s skin flickered oddly, like a corrupted image, around the end of Sombra’s weapon. The strangeness caught Sombra off-guard long enough for the man to bring up his arm with unexpected swiftness, knocking the weapon out of alignment and making the hacker’s shot go wide. The target lunged forward with a skillful elbow-strike, knocking Sombra against the wooden railing. He grabbed onto her right wrist, pinning it, and the machine-pistol, against the rail, then caught her left arm when she tried to throw a punch. Sombra ignored the sudden screaming from the crowd below as she noted that everywhere the two made contact, the target’s skin and clothes digitally distorted.

Sombra leaned back into the railing, quickly bringing up both her legs and kicking them forcefully into the man’s chest. She carefully watched the front of his suit distort as he stumbled backwards, ending up between and slightly in front of the two confused guards – who had just stepped out onto the balcony and now raised their weapons at Sombra.

_“Apagando las luces!”_

The electromagnetic pulse radiated out from Sombra’s uncrossing arms in a sphere of purple light, and the instant it washed over the target, his entire body seemed to glitch out of existence. The figure that stood in his place was wearing a sleek, yet clearly armored, midnight-blue bodysuit and a black, featureless, cloth-like mask that completely obscured his head and face. The two guards jumped in surprise, but both quickly recovered and began to raise their weapons toward the revealed impostor.

The rectangle of silver metal dropped again from its slot in the assassin’s right forearm, and the two halves split apart along its length, angling and reshaping as it spun in the masked man’s hand until it had become a silenced pistol that the assassin quickly fired into the abdomen of the guard to his left. In nearly the same motion, he lunged his left elbow backward into the guard at his right, spinning quickly as the man collapsed and firing an execution shot as he lay on the ground. He turned back toward Sombra just as she raised her pistol again, and lunged forward, kicking the weapon out of the hacker’s hand and sending it sailing over the balcony.

Before Sombra could react, the assassin was swinging his gun around toward her in what seemed to be an attempted pistol-whip, at least until the weapon unfolded again as it spun in his open palm, the grip and silencer retracting into the two longer pieces that had made up the bulk of the weapon just as they inverted, revealing a large, gleaming knife-blade. Sombra leaned backward out over the railing and watched the blade pass just above her face, and when the assassin pulled the weapon back for another strike, it was a fucking huge combat knife.

The masked man stabbed downward, the blade implanting deep in the wood as Sombra rolled out of the way, her foot finding the translocator she’d left on the ground. She ducked under a forceful swing as the assassin viciously tore the knife out of the railing and sent splinters flying in all directions. The hacker jumped backward, translocator in hand, and threw the device high over the assassin’s head and up along the wall directly over the balcony.

The assassin lunged again with the knife, and Sombra dived low, pushing herself into a spin as she fell toward the floor. She completed the spin somewhere near the ceiling, catching the translocator again and finding an extremely temporary horizontal footing along the wall. She let gravity pull the rest of her downward, pushing off the wall just as she lined up her dive, and tackled the assassin from above. The weakened railing shattered under the two combatants and they both fell toward the floor below.

With a mischievous smirk, Sombra brought her legs around and pushed off the assassin’s chest, sending him more rapidly toward the floor while buying herself more time in the air. Just before the height of her arc, she whiffed the translocator beacon downward, watching it land far below her and initiating transport just as she reached the end of near-weightlessness.

The crowd was already mostly evacuated from the room when Sombra regained her senses, standing amidst empty tables and replacing the translocator in her coat. She searched about for the assassin’s body, to no avail, but did catch the bright purple glint of her machine-pistol. She quickly dived for the weapon, surfacing out of her roll only to find the room empty and quiet.

_Dammit, must have disguised again._

She re-activated her stealth and bolted into a run, catching up to the mass of civilians exiting through the lobby, but it was a useless effort when she had no way of identifying the assassin. With a sigh, she ducked away into an alcove where she was unlikely to be overheard.

“I lost the target, but it wasn’t the target anyway, just some impostor trying to kill the guy’s… _oh shit_ , gotta go!”

While only a long sigh offered its reply into her ear, Sombra darted back out into the main ballroom, decloaked, and threw her translocator up through the gap in the broken railing. She materialized to find the target’s wife still hiding in the corner, and the huddled woman eyed Sombra with a strange expression of both fear and distaste.

Sombra returned the glare as she stowed away the translocator once again. “Yeah, okay, but did you see that guy who tried to kill you come back up here? Well, obviously _not_ , because you’re still alive, I guess I don’t really know what I…”

Sombra heard a series of frantic footfalls as someone running down the hallway toward them suddenly changed direction.

“Okay well…” Sombra began as she made for the balcony entrance, “sorry about all this shit. It’s fucked up, but so’s everything else. Get used to it!”

Sombra took off down the hallway, cloaking again as she rounded the corner she’d assumed the masked impostor must have taken, but after a quick search of the upper levels of the building, she still hadn’t caught sight of her quarry.

Widowmaker’s cool, exceptionally calm voice crackled in her ear.

“ _Sombra, we are moving to extraction. Get to the transport, or we are leaving you behind_.”

The hacker sighed. “Fine, target escaped anyway.” She paused in a strange consideration as she searched for a roof exit. “Well, the fake target did. The real target was dead the whole time, so… I guess we won?”

Sombra made her way to one of the hallways with windowed alcoves and caught sight of the waiting Talon transport craft, hovering just off the edge of a lower, flattened and paved section of roof, likely some sort of outdoor balcony. She saw Gabe, already waiting inside the ship, Widow, just at the edge of the roof and about to board, and…

… _herself_ , walking out across the roof to join the others.

_Oh Shit._

“Widow!” Sombra shouted over comms. “I need you to _shoot me in the head right now!_ ”

Before the hacker had even finished her command, the loud _CRACK_ of a rifle echoed across the rooftop, and Sombra’s doppelganger collapsed, lifeless, to the ground.

“You know… you did that a _little_ too quickly.” Sombra pulled out her translocator beacon, but hesitated. “Okay I need you to listen to me very carefully… _don’t do it again_.”

Sombra hurled the device out through the window, appearing just off to the side of the assassin whose corpse still bore her likeness. She tried not to look too closely as she replaced the beacon, quickly throwing out her left hand and hacking into the dead man’s technology to delete her own image from storage. The illusion flickered out, revealing the same midnight blue suit as before, the man’s mask now stained darker with a large amount of blood.

“That was… unsettling,” the hacker said with a shudder as she walked past the stoic-as-ever Widowmaker, the sniper's rifle still at the ready in case of more hostiles. Sombra took a seat on the transport and did her best to forget the image of her own face with a neat little hole at the center of her forehead.

  


* * *

  


Widowmaker sat across from her as the transport took off and headed back to base, and Sombra remained silent. Part of it, she knew, was that she didn’t really feel like talking anyway, but mostly she knew better than to interrupt Widow’s post-kill murder high. It was the one bit of emotion the sniper’s sad fate would ever grant her, and she would never forgive Sombra for ruining it.

Macabre as it was, Sombra supposed that was the one thing _she_ had to look forward to, as well. It always _did_ cheer her up just a little bit to see Widow actually feeling something. So Sombra watched for it: the tiny outburst of sinister laughter, the more-genuine-than-usual smile of amusement…

Nothing happened.

In fact, Widow actually seemed a bit more out of it than even her baseline. She was aversive, her eyes searching but never actually meeting Sombra’s, her body rigid nearly to the point of shaking, her hands clutching tightly at her rifle.

Something about it gave the hacker pause, concern beginning to brew in the back of her mind – but not in her expression.

“ _Sooo_ , you must have been waiting to do that for a while now, huh?” Sombra began, injecting a playful, prying taunt in to her voice and grinning the most mischievous grin she could manage. “Was it everything you hoped it would be?”

Widowmaker let out a breath she’d apparently been holding, her mouth twisting into a sneer. “You are still talking.”

Her voice was scathing, dripping with frustration and disappointment, but Sombra didn’t miss how her posture finally relaxed, the lost look in her eyes finding itself again with an exaggerated scowl.

Sombra felt a rush of feeling in her _own_ heart, and put as much of a sinister, evocative edge as she could on what would have otherwise been a gentle, reassuring smile forming at her lips.

“Well, _amiga_ … you’re not getting rid of me _that_ easily.”


End file.
